The purpose of this blog is to serve as a quick reference to political and economic data presented primarily in graphical format, with tables and other charts where appropriate. Use the search box to quickly locate the data you are seeking. Go Dems!

Our argument (shocker) is that the rise of the top 1 percent of incomes is not simply the result of a competitive, well-functioning market rewarding skills and capital to the precise degree necessary to elicit their supply. Instead, lots of the rise in top 1 percent of incomes is about the creation and/or redistribution of economic rents.

Readers were duly exercised about a paper published by Greg Mankiw which had to go through so many hoops to promote the idea that inequality was the result of merit as to be worthy of our Frederic Mishkin Iceland Prize for Intellectual Integrity.

Suffice it to say further ridicule of Mankiw is in order, and Parramore provides a useful contribution.

Here’s some pretty grim news about U.S. manufacturing -- employment in that sector fell below 12 million this year for the first time since 1946, and is now at the lowest level (11,648,000 manufacturing jobs in November) since March of 1941 (see chart, BLS data here). Since the onset of the recession in December 2007, manufacturing employment fell for 24 consecutive months, as the U.S. economy shed an average of 89,000 manufacturing jobs each month for the last two years.

From the peak manufacturing employment of 19.55 million jobs in 1979, the American manufacturing workforce has shrunk by more than 40%, as almost 8 million manufacturing jobs have been eliminated over the last thirty years, with almost 6 million of those losses taking place just since 2000. And there’s nothing to suggest that the trend won’t continue, so we can expect a continued contraction of U.S. manufacturing employment

But what about manufacturing output? That news is a little better. The chart below shows the decline in manufacturing employment plotted against the Gross Value of Final Products and Nonindustrial Supplies (in billions of constant 2000 dollars), as calculated by the Federal Reserve (data here). In the thirty year period between 1977 and 2007, U.S. manufacturing output doubled from $1.5 trillion to $3 trillion, before dropping to a ten-year low in June 2008 of $2.6 trillion, from the contractionary effects of the recession. Manufacturing output has been rebounding lately and it increased in four out of the last five months, after falling in ten out of the previous 11 months, signalling that the economy moved from recession to expansion in the middle of the year.

For those that don't know, the GIni Coefficient is a crude way of measuring inequality (You can see the math behind it here). The basic idea is that on a scale of 0-100, 0 would represent a country where everyone had identical amounts of money, and 100 would represent a world in which just one person had all the money and everyone else had nothing.